Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree

Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree (From the boy at Britannicus’s table to the emperor who, as he lay dying, regretted one thing — and never told anyone what it was.) — lesson 13 of the course: 6 parts, about 19 min of reading.

Rome feared that Titus would be a second Nero: he had Caecina killed right after dinner, lived with the Jewish queen Berenice and ruled the Guard with a heavy hand. As emperor he sentenced no senator to death, sent Berenice away and, within twenty-six months, lived through the eruption of Vesuvius, a fire in Rome and a plague. The episode tells of those years through the eyes of Pliny the Younger, who as a seventeen-year-old at Misenum saw a cloud shaped like a pine tree; of the fate of Pompeii and Herculaneum; of the opening of the Flavian Amphitheatre; and of the last words of an emperor who regretted one thing. It includes questions, a decision to make and a dispute over the date of the eruption.

Films

• A Cloud Like a Pine Tree — Misenum, early afternoon: a pine-shaped cloud is rising over the bay, and Admiral Pliny the Elder sails out to meet it.
• Pliny Sails Toward the Cloud — The route of Admiral Pliny the Elder from Misenum to Vesuvius and on to Stabiae during the eruption, and at Misenum his nephew with a book.
• From Nero’s Lake to the Arena — On the site of the lake of Nero’s Golden House the Flavians build an amphitheater; in AD 80 Titus opens it with games lasting a hundred days.

Articles

• A Cloud Like a Pine Tree — Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree — The galleys push off from the shore. Let us freeze this image, because someone is watching it.
• A Second Nero? — Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree — AD 55. The palace on the Palatine.
• Pliny Sails — Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree — Back to the sea. The admiral’s name is Gaius Plinius Secundus; today we call him Pliny the Elder.
• Cities Under Ash — Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree — Beneath the cloud lies Pompeii, about ten kilometers from the crater, downwind. From early afternoon pumice rains down here: light pebbles, first white, then gray, layer upon layer, for more than a dozen hours.
• One Hundred Days — Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree — AD 80. The fire lasts three days and three nights (Suetonius, Titus 8).
• He Regretted One Thing — Titus: A Cloud Like a Pine Tree — September AD 81. Titus travels to the land of the Sabines, to the family’s country estate.